Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

Chapter 1

Chapters 2–3, page 2

page 1 of 2

Summary: Chapter 2

Recalling his time at the college, the narrator
remembers with particular fascination the college’s bronze statue
of its Founder, a black man. He describes the statue as cold and
paternal, its eyes empty. At the end of his junior year, the narrator
takes a job driving Mr. Norton, one of the college’s white millionaire
founders, around the campus. In an attempt to show the old gentleman
the countryside near the campus, the narrator unwittingly drives Norton
to an area of ramshackle cabins. The cabins, which once served as
slave quarters, now house poor black sharecroppers. Though Norton
finds the cabins intriguing, the narrator immediately regrets having
driven him to this area, as he knows that Jim Trueblood lives here.
The college regards Trueblood with hatred and distrust because he
has impregnated his own daughter. Norton reacts with horror when
the narrator reveals this information, but he insists on speaking
with Trueblood.

Trueblood explains that he had a strange dream and woke
to find himself having sex with his daughter. Norton listens with
a morbid, voyeuristic fascination. Trueblood expresses wonder at
the fact that white people have showered him with more money and
help than before he committed the unspeakable taboo of incest. Norton, shocked
at the story, hands Trueblood a one-hundred-dollar bill to buy toys
for his children. He gets back into the car in a daze and requests
some whiskey to calm his nerves.

Summary: Chapter 3

The narrator, fearing that Norton might die
from shock, drives to the nearest tavern, the Golden Day, which
serves black people and also happens to be a brothel. As he approaches
the Golden Day, the narrator encounters a group of mentally disturbed
black war veterans who are being allowed an afternoon outside their home.
Their attendant is nowhere to be seen. The narrator intends to dash
in and out of the tavern, as the establishment has a bad reputation,
but the proprietor refuses to sell take-out whiskey. Some of the
veterans help carry Norton inside, since he has fallen unconscious.
As they soon as they pour some whiskey down his throat, he begins
to regain consciousness. The brutish attendant in charge of the
veterans now appears, shouting down from the area of the building
devoted to the brothel. Clad only in shorts, he asks why the veterans
are yelling. A brawl ensues. Norton falls unconscious again, and
the narrator and one of the veterans carry him upstairs to where
the prostitutes stay.

This particular veteran claims to be a doctor and a graduate
of the college. After Norton wakes, the veteran mocks Norton’s interest
in the narrator and the college. He says that Norton views the narrator
as a mark on his scorecard of achievement rather than as a man and
that the narrator thinks of Norton not as a man but as a god. He
calls the narrator an automaton stricken with a blindness that makes
him do Norton’s bidding and claims that this blindness is the narrator’s
chief asset. Norton becomes angry and demands that the narrator
take him back to the college. During the ride back, Norton remains
completely silent.

Analysis: Chapters 2–3

With Ellison’s first detailed image of Chapter 2, he
extends his critique of the ideas upheld by Booker T. Washington
and his followers. The statue honoring the Founder seems to depict
an abstract father symbol rather than an actual individual. Though
the Founder has allegedly made a great mark on history, we never
even learn his name. His individuality and humanity seem lost in
the statue’s cold bronze and stiff expression. The Founder’s anonymity
echoes the absence of Booker T. Washington’s name in the narrator’s
graduation speech after the “battle royal” in Chapter 1, an absence made
conspicuous by the narrator’s verbatim quotes from Washington’s
Atlanta Exposition Address. Ellison uses the Founder as a double
for Washington. Both men seemingly set out to design a program for
the advancement of black Americans (Washington founded the school
now called Tuskegee University), and both, hailed as great visionaries,
enjoy fervent worship on the part of their followers. Sadly, within
the text both have become invisible men: not even a record of their
names exists in the novel. By omitting their names, Ellison attempts
to signify such figures’ metaphoric invisibility within the real
world—the futility of their actions, their failure to exert any
real force on society. The novel also suggests that both men suffer
blindness: with the statue’s “empty” eyes, Ellison implies that
Washington’s philosophy is illusionary.

Part of Ellison’s derision of Washington lies in his belief
that Washington underestimated the power of prejudice among white Americans.
Yet, in this chapter, Ellison also explores prejudice from a new
angle, examining the social prejudice that emerges from economic
and educational inequalities and that can exist between educated
and uneducated blacks. Just as the monetary rewards of the battle
royal incite the narrator and his classmates to turn on one another
in Chapter 1, the rewards of social advancement offered by the
college incite the students and faculty to turn their backs on one
of the least-empowered groups of American blacks: the poor sharecroppers.
In an attempt to conform to the role of the model black citizen
expected of them by white trustees, these higher-status blacks disown
the dishonorable Jim Trueblood. This attempt to break from the lower-status
blacks in order to gain greater favor with the white community seems
to illustrate the narrator’s grandfather’s statement in Chapter
One that blind conformity to the good slave role constitutes an
act of treachery.